I felt like I was in a HURRICANE
Legendary Bayern manager Ottmar Hitzfeld on being blown away by THAT comeback
OTTMAR HITZFELD can still feel it now.
Der orkan, he calls it. The hurricane.
The blast of noise from Manchester United’s fans in the Nou Camp when Teddy Sheringham equalised in the 1999 Champions League final.
His horror as the game raged out of control in three catastrophic minutes of stoppage time before Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s winner ripped the European Cup from his grasp. Twenty years on, Hitzfeld still wears a look of disbelief when he talks about it.
A master tactician who trained to be a maths teacher before becoming one of the greatest football coaches of his generation, the 70-year-old has long since given up looking for the logic in it all.
‘I can’t,’ he replies with a gentle shake of the head when asked to explain how Bayern Munich, of all teams, fell apart in Barcelona that night. ‘ That’s why we are talking about it now.’
Afterwards, when he closed the door on a silent and shattered group of players, the Bayern coach wandered back into the tunnel, where he embraced his old friend Alex Ferguson.
‘ He just said “Incredible”,’ recalls Hitzfeld. ‘ He didn’t say sorry, but you could tell he was apologising in some way. I’ve always had a strong relationship with Ferguson. There’s a lot of mutual respect and we like each other as personalities as well.
‘But we never talked about it again. What can you say? It speaks for itself. We knew that for one of us it was the greatest thing ever, and for the other it was the worst thing ever. That moment of embracing in the tunnel, the gesture and the empathy, meant more than a thousand words.’
It was the only time in seven meetings between the men that Ferguson emerged victorious. ‘ I lost the wrong one,’ says Hitzfeld, smiling.
He beat United home and away en route to winning the Champions League with Borussia Dortmund in 1997, and again when Bayern finally lifted the European Cup in 2001. He is among a select group of five coaches to have won it with two different clubs.
Bayern also played United twice in the group stage in 1998-99, drawing both games. But when it really mattered, Ferguson somehow found a way to win.
It is the one result more than any other that Hitzfeld would change. Even more so than the last game of his career at the 2014 World Cup, when he came within two minutes of taking Argentina to a penalty shootout as coach of unfancied Switzerland.
‘Yes, of course,’ he says. ‘ But you have to move on. You can’t spend your life dreaming about what might have been.’
We meet in the Swiss city of Basel, just over the border from Germany, where Hitzfeld has retired to his birthplace, Lorrach.
He has kept the appointment despite a minor operation at the start of this week that will prevent him renewing acquaintances with Ferguson in the 1999 reunion game at Old Trafford on Sunday.
The two stay in touch by text message. ‘ I don’t phone him because I can’t understand him — my English isn’t good enough,’ says Hitzfeld through an interpreter. Studious and quietly spoken, he was a good choice to succeed Giovanni Trapattoni as Bayern coach and act as a buffer between outspoken president Franz Beckenbauer and a dressing room full of personalities such as Stefan Effenberg, Lothar Matthaus and Oliver Kahn.
‘As a coach, you’ve got to be strict with people like that and rein in the wild horses,’ says the man nicknamed Der General. ‘ Trapattoni didn’t give the players clear boundaries. I had to be a bit stricter. But you can’t win a battle with Beckenbauer if you’re a player or coach.
‘ There are advantages and disadvantages to having a World Cup winner as your boss. The good thing is they know about football, the bad thing is they’ve always got an opinion. Sympathy means nothing at Bayern. You’ve just got to win. You’re always under pressure.’
The pressure on Hitzfeld was even greater because Bayern arrived at the Nou Camp bidding for their first European Cup success in 23 years and — like United — still on for the Treble (they would later lose the German Cup final to Werder Bremen).
Unlike United, who had just won the Premier League title on the last day against Tottenham and the FA Cup final against Newcastle, Bayern’s easy run in the Bundesliga meant they were a little undercooked.
Hitzfeld nods. ‘You try to stop that happening but it does. We lost our momentum a little bit. It was an advantage for United to have those games because the concentration was there, whereas we had to dip and then build it back up again.’
It didn’t show as Bayern dominated the game. Mario Basler gave them an early lead. Mehmet Scholl hit a post and Carsten Jancker the bar.
‘They were missed chances and I felt we should have been putting the game to bed, but I wasn’t scared at that point,’ says Hitzfeld. ‘We were in control of the game.’ Then it started.
‘Ferguson had to risk something. When you’re in that situation, you have to throw players like that into the cold water and see what happens. The fans exploded in the United end when Sheringham equalised. There was a hurricane. I realised it could happen and United could get a second.
‘Situations like that are so rare. When a goal like that happens and the way the fans react, it’s different to a normal game.
‘I’ve never experienced anything even close to it. There wasn’t enough time to communicate anything or react between the goals. United suddenly had a momentum and euphoria behind them — then Solskjaer scored the goal of his life. I felt exactly what the players were feeling. The frustration that United held all the cards and we were reeling.
‘If United had dominated the game and had lots of chances, then we’d have been prepared, but it was the other way around. It’s a shock that stays with you.’
Hitzfeld believes the pain of ’99 helped Bayern go one better when they beat Valencia on penalties in the 2001 final.
That summer, he was installed as favourite to succeed Ferguson at Old Trafford when the United manager announced he planned to retire a year later, but he insists there was no contact with the club or his friend over the job.
In fact, Hitzfeld never worked outside Germany or Switzerland, where he won a total of 25 trophies and was twice named World Coach of the Year.
When he reached 65, he returned to Lorrach with wife Beatrix to spend more time with their son Matthias and three grandchildren Henry, Carlotta and Oscar.
Hitzfeld is enjoying retirement and, perhaps surprisingly, this opportunity to relive the 1999 Champions League final. ‘People talk to me about it a lot, about the substitutions I made and the team I picked,’ he concludes. ‘I really don’t think I made any mistakes. I wouldn’t do anything differently.’
‘The United end exploded when Sheringham equalised. I’ve never experienced anything even close to it’